I've tried all kinds of diets, including time restricted eating, I've eventually failed at all of them for various reasons, or succeeded, but was unable to enjoy keeping the lifestyle.
Enter the portion control diet. This is the only diet that I've been successful with, and I've been doing it for just over a year now. The reason I'm able to sustain it, is because I can eat whatever I want. For example, I eat ice cream every night if I want, but only a scoop, and when I go out to eat, I split my entree and take half home. The only caveat is that I try my best not to eat processed food; if I can't make it at home with whole ingredients, then I will likely not eat it.
I can now look at a plate of food an know exactly how much will fill me up (this took a while). So, even when I don't leave the table feeling full, I know I'll feel satisfied within 15 minutes. I used to love the feeling of being overstuffed, but now I just feel sick when I overeat, and I don't enjoy it.
I've lost over 30 lbs in the past year using the portion control method. It's not a lot, but it's a healthy reduction, and one that I know I can sustain.
I know everyone is different when it comes to dieting, both mentally and physically, but I just wanted to share my experience with the most successful diet I've ever undertaken. I hope someone else can benefit from my anecdote.
>>The only caveat is that I try my best not to eat processed food; if I can't make it at home with whole ingredients, then I will likely not eat it.
This, by itself, is a huge step. I bet that's a significant reason why you're losing weight. It was definitely a huge part of my successful weight loss. Basically I don't eat junk(pretty much means processed foods) and I avoid carb sources like bread/rice/pasta. Success was had. But I won't lie, losing weight and keeping it off is by far the most difficult thing I've ever done(and still doing) in my life. It's no joke and I have a new respect for those with weight issues. It's not a trivial thing to fix and I almost gave up twice. Constant daily battles walking pass the pizza, cookies, etc.
Anyone here who works in a food store and keeps having to put the box of cookies/candies back in the right place when someone left it near the cashier? Sorry, that was me barely fighting off impulse.
It seems kind of strange to me that in America, we let marketers push junk food and all other means of unhealthy food with little to no regulation, and then when we can't resist the cravings and eat a whole box of Oreos, it's our fault for not having enough discipline to say "no" for the 100th time this week.
I know at the end of the day ultimately we are responsible for our own actions, but there is nothing in this country to make it any easier on ourselves.
Unfortunately any attempt at regulation, like Bloomberg limiting the size of soda containers, is met with cries of "But my FREEDOM. I need to be FREE to buy as large a container as I want!"
Never mind that the only freedom being preserved here is the freedom of marketers to manipulate the public. Nobody asked for the obscenely large sizes of drinks we have available now. Companies just realized they can sell 3 cents of extra soda for an additional 25 cents and went nuts.
The reason it's met with those cries of freedom is that I don't trust Bloomberg or you to be right about what's healthy or not healthy. In fact, public health authorities are frequently spectacularly, 180 degrees, catastrophically wrong about what is or is not healthy. So while I do not drink soda at all, much less 64 oz buckets of it, I don't want to give the power to ban that to the same people who think salt and animal products are also bad for you.
It wasn't even a ban though. It was a restriction on the size of the container. You could still drink soda, as much as you like. It's well known that when you put larger amounts of food and drink in front of people, they consume more, regardless of whether they felt a physical need for it or not. Instead of letting marketers use psychological tricks to make themselves more money, I'd much rather let the government use the same tricks to make the public more healthy.
Even if science later finds out that soda is super healthy and we should all drink nothing else, I'd much rather have regulations motivated by people asking "Is this healthy?" instead of "Does this make me the most profit?"
I don't want to discourage you so much as warn you; I too have spent a lifetime dieting and have lost and gained back weight many times. All working diets feel like you to maintain them for ever during what I call "the momentum phase". Your brain is amazing at slowly making diets cease to work over time.
That said, portion control and calorie counting are components of a working weight loss plan and one should be extremely skeptical of diets like the "eat only before midnight diet". I have never been a night snacker and managed to get morbidly obese just fine without it.
I feel that I'm out of "the momentum phase", because I've never maintained a diet for over a year, until now. However, I realize that I may be deluding myself on that point.
I think that the key to my success is eliminating all but portion control. I don't count calories, or anything else that would make more work for me. All of those things are the things that would make my diet cease to work over time. Now I eat whatever I want, but keep processed foods to an absolute minimum.
Growing up, my nickname used to be "Trashcan", because I would finish everything on my plate, and then eat whatever my dining partners didn't from their plate. I still do, but I take it as leftovers, and eat it for breakfast or lunch the next day. I used to relish being stuffed to the point where I couldn't move. I still very occasionally overeat, but now it's more of a sick feeling that I despise.
I rode an exercise bike after dinner while watching netflix until I ran a 1000 calorie deficit and the weight fell off. I also follow his strength training guide for the laziest possible workout that still yields impressive gains. http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/
For motivation I have an instagram account that ghost follows personal trainers and competition athletes to see what they eat, as now I lift a lot. @erindimondfitness is a good one, since that's one of the few trainers I found that doesn't shill 'detox' and other pseudoscience.
I appreciate your warning. It seems worth keeping in mind.
Your "eat only before midnight diet" (which I've never heard of) is related to what I expected to read when I saw the title of the article. I thought this article was going to be about which twelve hours were the best for eating and staying slim.
I strongly suspect that if they followed up this "constrain all your meals to 12 of the 24 hour day and fast the other 12", with tests that compared results of different 12-hour segments, they would end up finding that eating during segments containing lots of daylight, such as 7am-7pm, would be superior to 12-hour segments with a lot of darkness, such as 4pm-4am.
I hope they do this followup, and if my folk-wisdom-derived speculation is correct, then "eat your last meal before X:00pm" wouldn't be a diet, per se, but a sensible constraint to include in any reasonable diet.
I will second the idea that avoiding processed foods has been a big part of your success. I started doing so just to keep my sodium intake down and lost a surprising amount of weight.
And thank you for providing a nice definition of it, "... if I can't make it at home". I've tried to explain to loved ones the idea of 'whole' foods vs. processed and found it harder than it should be.
I didn't downvote you. I merely expressed my dissapointment after reading the article and looking for interesting discussion that yours was the first comment which spawned a whole unrelated side-thread.
Let me preface this by admitting that, outside of work related tasks, I'm extremely lazy. I mean, so lazy that I have to set a reminder on my phone just to check my to-do list for the day.
That being said, I haven't tried calorie counting in years, but the problem was that I was just too lazy to look up each item, guess the weight, and calculate the calories. I think I had a Palm Treo at the time, and was using something on that to track things, but I would always forget to enter the calories.
Basically, after years of figuring myself out, I think I "know thyself" enough to know that that won't work. I do have a knack for remembering non-time-related things, so I've leveraged that to just remember portions. I can look at a plate, and know exactly how much to eat so that I will feel full 15 minutes later after I stop eating. I don't worry about the calories, just the ingredients, so limited processed food.
I suspect most calorie counting methods that are disruptive (require effort and attention) to making the food will have a high failure rate.
I'll briefly describe my workflow, with the caveat that I have not been using it for long.
I have a digital kitchen scale with a "tare" button. Just put the plate on the scale and press "tare". This resets the scale to zero. Then put on some bread: the scale now measures the bread only. Press "tare" again, and spread some butter on the bread: the scale now measures the butter only, etc.
In this way, measuring each ingredient requires very little effort.
MyFitnessPal makes logging easy. I scan the bar codes of the food I buy and the nutrient content is automatically downloaded from the web.
Ingredients that are used before are easily available from a list (your local database), so you don't need to scan bar codes every time you eat. (With vegetables and fruits, the bar code is only available in the store.)
It's also possible to bundle the ingredients into "meals" (a set of ingredients and amounts). So that you can add whole meals to your log with a single click.
Since you can log entries in advance, it's also possible to "budget" future calories, and it's easy to make changes to it.
E.g.: having oatmeal for breakfast. I click the meal "Oatmeal" from the app. The individual ingredients of the meal are automatically logged (80 grams Oatmeal, 300 grams milk, 30 grams strawberry jam).
I put my cereal bowl on my scale. Press tare, and measure out 80 grams Oatmeal. Press tare again, and measure out 30 grams jam. And press tare and measure out 300 grams milk.
If I use something else instead of jam that particular meal, it's easy to change single ingredients. E.g., delete the jam and add nuts.
It's not a perfect method, since it does not work for food bought in a restaurant or from the cafeteria at work, etc.
I tried diligently for quite a few weeks to log calories. I generally avoid pre-packaged foods, so no barcode to scan. I do eat out fairly often, but prefer non-chain places. It's hard to figure out how to break down everything in the Turkey Sandwich. I cook at home often, too. I just found it very difficult and time consuming to log all of the ingredients to a recipe and portion it out (if I made a recipe for my girlfriend and I, and I had 60% and she had 40% there wasn't really a way to convey that). I crave variety and I found that makes this way more difficult.
I feel like I make healthy choices, and those can be harder to log.
I also wasn't very confident about what I found in their database or online. Something like an apple can vary greatly in size and while number vary on the Internet, it was hard to correlate that to get a confident result.
This discussion has shown that, if anything, the only thing we can rely on is that our bodies are incredibly complex. There does not appear, at least to me, any consistently correct way to do things when diet and exercise are concerned.
All of this is why I prefer to just stick with the basics:
- Real, unprocessed food
- Calories from food, not drinks
- Consistently getting up and out of the chair
- Sleeping when I'm tired
- Waking up when I'm not tired
- Exercising regularly
I'm happy, healthy, and energetic. I'll let scientists keep working on the hard stuff without stressing too many details.
There may not be a consistently correct way to optimize health, but there is a consistently correct principle when it comes to weight loss. Consumer fewer calories than you burn and you will lose weight (even if those calories come from processed foods: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/).
...unless your body responds to a reduction in caloric intake by burning fewer calories.
If you employ a caloric restriction diet, you must do something to keep your metabolism from down-regulating, by whatever means that works for you. Otherwise, you will get stuck at a weight-loss plateau that is probably well above your goal weight, and further restricting calories from there might just worsen your situation.
You can't push on a string. Don't consume fewer calories than you burn; burn more calories than you consume. It's a fine hair to split, but be aware that they are not two independently controllable variables.
> If you employ a caloric restriction diet, you must do something to keep your metabolism from down-regulating
No you don't. You will always burn calories by simply existing. You can get no exercise and still lose weight simply by cutting calories. Cutting 100 calories from your daily diet may be matched one-to-one with metabolism decreases, but I guarantee that if you cut 1,000 calories from your daily diet you will lose weight.
In the degenerate case where you restrict your diet to zero calories over an extended period of time, your metabolism will permanently down-regulate to burn zero calories.
It was a tongue-in-cheek reference to death from complete starvation. It is true in the sense that the basal metabolic rate of a dead body is zero kilocalories per hour.
You don't have to do it forever, you just need to do it until you're happy with your weight. I've personally used this method of weight loss because I find it very difficult to exercise effectively when I'm running on a caloric deficit. I consumed 1,000 - 1,500 calories a day for ~2 months and lost ~20 pounds, then began living life normally again. I found it more sustainable than grinding out weight loss over a much longer period of time by exercising.
Lowering your BMI from 31 to 24 by cutting fat makes you healthier and increases your expected lifespan (regardless of whether or not you exercise), chopping off your legs does not.
See, your goal is not just to lose weight. Your goal is to lose fat. Your body will burn a hell of a lot of muscle if you just sit still and not eat.
And becuase you're burning more muscle than fat, you're even going to lose more weight. Hooray!
For added bonus, you can lay in bed all day so that you lose bone density as well. Even more weight loss even faster! So much better BMI. Much healthy and awesome.
That wasn’t true for me personally. I personally lost weight almost with mechanical precision. About a 7500 calorie deficit resulted indeed in 1 lost kg. That’s with about half the deficit coming from exercise and the other half coming from cutting calories and is using all the bog-standard formulas for roughly estimating my base metabolism. I was astonished by the mechanical precision of those number, really astonished. I didn’t expect that at all.
However, this has many moving parts and cheating (mostly by consuming more calories) is ridiculously easy. My guess would be that that’s the effect many people see when they don’t succeed. All of this is really hard and I was lucky to be in an extremely privileged position where I could devote lots of my attention to this task. Not many people are so lucky. Motivation obviously plays a crucial role and I absolutely do believe that it is central to successfully losing weight. The mechanics are simple and do indeed work like clockwork. But that doesn’t mean you can make them work like clockwork for yourself …
So, yeah, the body may be astonishingly mechanical when you execute everything perfectly, but motivation is the crucial second parts that allows you to execute everything correctly. And it may well be that to keep motivated it helps to be active or to eat certain thing. (I, for example, know that eating pasta with tomato sauce – formerly my absolute favourite food – will keep me hungry for longer. Meanwhile the same amount of calories from some salad with a vinaigrette and grilled chicken breast will keep me feeling full for longer.)
This principle may be vacuously true, but it's utterly useless. Kind of like noting that drivers should "reduce their relative velocity with respect to nearby massive objects" in order to reduce our country's (ridiculous) level of traffic fatalities. Yeah, that's true. But basically worthless in terms of solving the problem.
They didn't say they disagreed, and in fact there is very little consensus about food science. Even the article says that the process by which the time-restricted diet functions isn't well understood.
The links you provided debunk the notion of weight loss being impacted... but health seems to still have some potential links.
"The last point that Dhurandhar brings up is an important caveat: There are very good studies that suggest that skipping breakfast does influence our health in other meaningful ways. For instance, it’s well known to affect metabolism, since it forces the body to stay in a fasting state for a longer period of time. Last year, a study found that skipping breakfast was linked to coronary heart disease, presumably because the extra time fasting leads to a rise in a group of factors that together increase heart risk. “Prolonged fasting,” says study author Leah Cahill, “leads to increases in diastolic and systolic blood pressure, blood concentrations of insulin, triglycerides, free fatty acids and LDL-cholesterol, and to decreases in blood concentrations of HDL-cholesterol.”"
I believe eating breakfast is an indicator of a healthy lifestyle. Eating breakfast doesn't make you healthier, lose more weight, or exercise more, but the type of person who eats breakfast is more likely to exercise and eat healthier meals throughout the day.
This link mentions a few studies that "show the healthiness of breakfast". Instead of forcing people to eat breakfast or not eat breakfast, it studies about 4,000 people and their daily habits. Some anecdotal takeaways is that people who eat breakfast are more likely to exercise, and women who eat breakfast typically eat less calories in a day.
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/lose-weight-eat-breakfast
>Two studies in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association backed up this finding. Though they were funded by cereal companies, dietitians say they underscore the message - breakfast is important to weight loss.
I'd be very careful here. While studies funded by private interests are probably not tampered with, the results generally are through reporting bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporting_bias#Reporting_biases.... Basically, these cereal companies can keep funding studies and publishing the ones that serve their economic interests - the scientific world is rife with this kind of crap (seriously, this isn't a conspiracy theory, it's the norm). There are other studies that directly contradict the cereal-company ones btw: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/is-breakfast-overra...
Ok, so there's nothing inherently wrong with eating breakfast. That being said, I'm not sure anyone can say that people who eat breakfast are "they type of person who is more likely to exercise and eat healthier meals" -- WebMD makes no effort to substantiate their claim at all with any references. That, and the fact that, at least here in the good ol' US of A, there is an enormous problem with obesity, diabetes, and a host of other metabolic-related illnesses. I bet if anyone counted, they'd find that an extremely vast majority of those people eat breakfast everyday. Anecdotally speaking, almost all of the people I know who skip breakfast are absolute physical specimens when it comes overall health and physique (That doesn't mean there aren't those who fit that criteria who DO eat breakfast, just a personal observation)
There has been a lot of research around periods of fasting, and Martin Berkhan has done a lot of work parsing out nonesense (poorly designed studies, etc.) on this particular topic. This specific article might be something you should check out regarding the cortisol awakening response, and why people who eat breakfast generally tend to weigh more than their intermittent fasting counterparts: http://www.leangains.com/2012/06/why-does-breakfast-make-me-...
I find I can't eat soon after waking up - I'm simply not hungry at the start of the day and I find I get indigestion if I eat irrespective of that (which happens occasionally due to well meaning people nagging me to have some breakfast).
This means that I usually (on working days at least) miss breakfast. I don't have any particular health problems that might relate to this so I presume that this is healthy enough.
For thousands of years, most Indians(as in from India) ate twice a day. The 1st meal was usually between 10 am to 1 pm. The 2nd meal was before 7 pm(sunset).
I used to be overweight(my eating window was about 14 hours) and then I switched to a strict 2 meals a day diet(8 hr eating window) -- the 1st meal at 10 am and the second before 7 pm. Add a lil bit yoga and walking, I lost about 10 kg in 6 weeks.
Indian Ayurveda books talk about not eating/consuming any food after sunset.
Older folks (presumably retired) can get away with eating a whole lot less. Piety probably provides the means and structure to keep the 1/day in place.
If you're looking to work on your eating practice, I suggest eating when you're hungry and only when you're hungry. Don't eat at any particular time of day. Make sure you're truly hungry. Some of us don't even know what that feels like anymore because we eat so often.
As a further challenge, try to stop eating as soon as you no longer feel hungry (and be sure to eat slowly). Some of us don't stop until we've finished our massive portion regardless of how full we feel. You may be surprised to see just how little food you need to consume in order to satiate hunger.
I gathered that you'll only start to feel sated after about 20 minutes after starting to eat, so yeah, eating slowly would definitely help. Of course, limiting portions to what you actually need instead of a seemingly infinite stack of food will also help.
I'm a practicioner of intermittent fasting, and I've found that an 8 hour window is ideal for eating my meals, with a 16 hour fast. I can eat like shit on occasion and it doesn't do a thing to my physique. It's been pretty sustainable; I've been doing it for a good 4 years now. You might give it a try!
I found out about all of this from http://leangains.com. The guy has some really good reads and he always provides the science/citations from medical journals.
Something similar seems to have worked for Paul Krugman:
"I have some recent experience along those lines. Yes, I’ve lost a fair bit of weight over the past two years (no special forcing event, just the approach of the big six-oh), and learned a few things about myself along the way.
...
But what has worked for me is severe caloric restriction two days a week. In case you’re wondering, it’s actually very unpleasant. But periodic suffering seems to suit my personality."
Of course, he goes on to say he has a fitbit, does daily cardio, and tracks his weight, so I'm not sure how he's teasing out the confounding variables.
i also thought about doing 2 days of calorie restriction based on a bbc show by michael mosley (linked from the article below), who claims it's the optimum for health and weight, but could only sustain it for 2-3 weeks. he also suggests 3 minutes of intense workout is all you need (2nd link), as it's the optimum for the health benefits of exercise.
Also do IF, and I'm glad someone repped Martin Berkhan for the work he's done trying to dispel some of the myth associated with extended fasting. For anyone who gives a shit, there are several articles on http://www.leangains.com/ that show that it's not just the fact that it's harder to overeat when you have a limited feeding window -- but that there are hormonal effects elicited from periods of fasting that can be leveraged to enhance not only your physique, but your overall health.
I've done IF as well for extended periods of time (I quit mostly because I wanted to gain weight). The most common schedule is to skip breakfast and eat a late "lunch". I.e. if you wakeup at 8am, have your eating window be between 4pm and midnight. If you have a less flexible schedule, there's really not much harm eating just one really big meal after work, together with some more snacking (preferably high-protein) before bed.
In my experience, it's much easier to fast the first half of the day and do social eating in the evening and go to bed full, than doing the opposite.
As another poster mentioned, fast during the morning hours and you should be fine. There is no problem with night eating, I do it all the time. I fast while I'm at work -- keep moving around, keep yourself oriented on tasks, and the next thing you know it's 2 o'clock. Most days I try to get a 16 hour fast in, but it all depends (Lunch meetings with clients can sometimes throw a wrench in things)
The mice constrained to eating high-fat high-sugar food in a 9 hour window still gained weight, but the importance of this is that they gained less weight than those mice whose constraint was a 12 hour window, despite eating the same amount of calories.
So try eating the same amount of calories as you do now, but in a smaller time window and you might lose weight.
Men generally have better results with 8 or 6 hours windows. It's usually recommended that women have a 10 or 8 hour window, though I don't know the specific reasons.
There are a few diets that recommend an "all you can eat" 4 hour window, but recommend only going that route if you don't have the discipline for a 8 or 6 hour window.
Also note that studies have shown that it takes more than 24 hours of fasting for people who are diabetic or prediabetic to have similar results to those who show no signs of diabetes fasting for only 12-16 hours.
I've skipped breakfast for years. Actually, I only eat when hungry. I felt bad about this until Dr. Dean Adell said he
did the same thing. I know the studies say breakfast is important. Dr. Adell admitted, but told people not to follow his eating habits, that he mainly ate at night. He said he did
eat a balanced dinner with vegetables and fruit. I think he
said he snacked during the day, and drank a lot of coffee. I'm getting a physical today--I hope my blood numbers
come back normal? Oh yea, when I was younger I drank too much, smoked, took drugs, but was never a Foodie. (I'm hoping that saved me?)
It's not a magical license to eat as much as you want! It's still very easy to eat a surplus of calories during the day even if you're doing intermittent fasting.
I currently eat during an 8-9 hour window (12pm-9pm) but mostly because it's much easier for me to stay satiated over the whole day when eating like this and keep my total calories down.
Use something like MyFitnessPal to track your calories, set a calorie goal for each day (below your maintenance level) and you will be amazed how easy it is to lose weight (or gain weight if that's your goal).
Also, there's nothing wrong with skipping breakfast.
Skipping or eating light for breakfast has worked miracles for me. While agreed that it is definitely not a license to eat however much you want, there are some convincing arguments that eating in this pattern (particularly delaying carbohydrate intake until the evening hours) creates metabolic inefficiencies that cause more of the consumed energy from the diet to be "wasted", perhaps giving a person a couple hundred calories of leeway in their diet and still see effective weight control. Check out some the work of John Keifer, his opinion on this is fascinating, particularly his rants on his podcast: http://body.io/category/podcast/
That's a 12 hour window for mice. Humans have a slower metabolism than mice, so I suspect that to get a similar effect we'd have to use a longer time period.
Some people claim that a 24 hour fast once a week does wonders for them. It's all just anecdotes at this point though.
Many people have found success using similar methods popularized by Martin Berkhan’s Leangains or Brad Pilon’s Eat Stop Eat. So anecdotally, efficacy isn't just limited to Rats (although I don't know the state of controlled studies in humans).
It’s interesting watching these intermittent fasting styles grow from niche body building communities to general population. It seems to be a great heuristic based way of keeping overall food intake under control.
For what it's worth, I've tried several approaches to lose weight and the one that works for me is intermittent fasting.
I was never obese or anything, just a bit overweight.
I usually only eat dinner. Between about 20 and midnight I allow myself to eat whatever I want. This just fits my personality, I find it easier to skip meals knowing that later I'll be free to have whatever I want than constantly watching what I eat. I suspect most diets work, the trick is to find one that you can live with in the long run. This probably has to do more with personality than biochemistry.
This has been relatively common knowledge for a few years, at least, and the science behind it is very sound and also makes a lot of evolutionary sense. Fasting has an incredibly good impact on our metabolisms and our overall health, especially for those who are suffering from diabetes.
Has a really good graphic on the impacts. One of the critical things to note here is that the allotment of food to the restricted group and the unrestricted group was the same. Fasting detractors commonly try and create an association between fasting and reduced caloric load, which can be the case, but this study shows that fasting has a different mechanism for weight loss.
I wonder how they managed to keep the calorie intake the same for each group as mentioned in the study?
Either the mice self-regulated this, and the shorter window mice learned to eat more when it was available or there was a fixed amount of food available then the window seems less relevant unless they tracked when the food was gone for the day.
I am doing one of the fasting systems in islam. I have been doing it for around two month.
What i am experiencing in observing this are mainly good things, which are:
- I can controll my eating habits into a good systematic way, in sahoor and iftar. Before I would eat regardless of time or my hunger level, it is just difficult for me to moderate myself.
- My state of mind seems improved quite a lot. I am more aware of my self, my being, my hunger, and many other aspects in my life.
- I can taste food a lot more better, before I would just stuff anything as long as it is there. After I got used to the fasting, I am more selective of what I eat and enjoy each bite with great gratefulness.
Of course there are several times that are difficult for me when I am doing it. But they are far out weighted by the better things.
This is based on my own experiences and they may differ with other people's.
How does this work for people who regularly burn 500-1000 calories in a workout (bikers, swimmers, runners, skiers, etc)? I'm genuinely curious, not so much from a weight loss perspective but from a mortality/longevity point of view.
It can help prevent diabetes and is theorized to assist in slowing down aging (through HGH secretion). Longer fasts are theorized to help stave off cancer to some extent, but I don't believe those ideas are backed up by hard science yet.
What works for me: skip breakfast, skip lunch, eat a large dinner with a lot of protein (fish/meats/eggs) and green vegetables. After dinner I can pretty much eat whatever I want left / can afford to eat. Works for me.
I have recently changed my way of living loosing 40 pounds in 4 months. The number one factor is exercise and holding back on carbs. I actually feel better not eating carbs (but I do miss my pasta and my bread which i only eat occasinally)
A family of four we cook all our meals ourselves completely from scratch unless we go out for dinner that also helps me control what I am getting. I drink wine and drinks when I want to, try to keep my lunches to fish and dinners to meat and veggies.
But I would say exercise is the most important of everything I am doing.
How does this reconcile the advice that eating more often (say, 6 times a day) but with smaller portions helps increase metabolic rate and thus helps with weight loss?
No, I'm a hard gainer at age 29. According to my athletic-snack cookbook this means I'm "inefficient" because I waste a lot of energy as heat. I seem to be really hot a lot of the time, I handle cold temps well (as long as I have enough food), sweat like a dog in dry saunas (and do not enjoy them), and every girl I've been with says I'm too warm, so it seems to make sense.
OT, yes, but the struggle is real. When I really wanted to gain weight and I was lifting with good intensity I ate over 1000 cal surplus. But as far as wellness I assume that sort of excess is good for gaining muscle quickly but very bad for my long-term health so I doubt I'll eat like that again.
Stuffing yourself with solid food is indeed a chore. Shakes are an easier way. As is dumping butter and olive oil in your carbs. 1 teaspoon is 100 calories.
Funny I was in the same boat for first 2 years of working out, starting bulking with more oils, butters and shakes in addition to my usual 1 cup of carbs per day. Gained plenty of fat. Then got a few injuries in a row, lost intensity in the gym and now have more fat than I want!
Even if the same amount is eaten, it differs depending on if it's in a time-restricted window or spread throughout the day. That is not intuitive and indeed goes counter to the prevailing advice of eating many small meals throughout the day.
Thanks for pointing that out. Still, it makes sense to me that excess input energy in the short term will leave to 'wasted' energy. Ie less calories taken in
I'm not convinced that the system wouldn't adapt over a longer time period to allow for higher throughput removing the effect
It's just calories in vs. calories burned, nothing more nothing less.
Why does everyone make it more complicated than this?
Of course not consuming calories for half the day (does sleep count or not? I couldn't tell from the article), as compared to those who do, helps you not gain weight.
Because it is more complicated than this. One point is where is the causation in this correlation (calories vs weight). Everyone who doesn't want to think a lot about it think that your consuming of too much calories makes you gain weight. But evidence is that you having too much weight demands you to consume more calories - and it is very difficult to escape all the tricks your brain and body have to make you do what they want. The same happens when you burn calories, your body demands you to consume more calories.
So how to loose weight if your overweight or overexhausted body will keep demanding you to eat excessive calories? The trick is to consume different kinds of calories, and this is where consuming less carb and more fat enters.
A good analysis I heard here in HN once (sorry, don't remember the author) is that just saying is calories in vs calories burn is like explaining why a Super Bowl stadium is full of people saying: "Because more people got in than went out". It is not an useful analysis, it is not actionable and it shows that you know nothing about the dynamics of this particular phenomen.
> "[...] your consuming of too much calories makes you gain weight. But evidence is that you having too much weight demands you to consume more calories"
Appetite is at best correlated with weight, not a causal relationship.
> "[...] calories in vs calories burn [...] is not actionable"
I don't see this. The pretty clear action item is to eat less, which while not easy, seems obvious. Can you explain this more?
Well, it is not me, it is some studies. But I'm sorry I can't google them right now.
But the evidence, not proof, it is this counter intuitive causal relationship that if you have more weight (or exercise more), you have more appetite. And altough sounds "easy" to eat less, it is not. Just like it is not easy to skip sleep. Your body want this... This explain a few decades of moral judgement of obese people just as being lazy, not having enough strong will and stuff. It is just that is not that easy to make people sustainably eat less calories for long periods of time. Not because of character, but because your body and mind have tricks that are stronger than any rationale.
sigh, there's one of you in every thread about weight loss these days.
it's not that simple, it never has been. you're just flat-out WRONG. you're not the only enlightened person in a sea of idiots. you're not smarter than all the scientists and dieticians on this. if it were as simple as that there would be no scientific inquiry into this area.
look at this map of the (known!) human metabolism. you think this system is 100% efficient, 100% of the time? you think if you put one calorie in one end, one calorie pops out the other, like a tube of marbles? you really think this? we don't even know how this shit WORKS, let alone the laws regarding its efficiency.
but hey, everyone wearing those silly white coats can go home and watch some reality tv, we've figured it out! calories in, calories out! the answer was staring us in the face the entire time! who cares about hormones and metabolic pathways and endocrine pathology and nutrient intake? calories in, calories out! that's all there is to it!
quite honestly this kind of intellectual laziness disguised as common sense is the LAST thing i'd expect to find on HN.
"The caloric intake for all the mice was the same."
"By the end, the mice eating at all hours were generally obese and metabolically ill, reproducing the results of the earlier study. But those mice that ate within a nine- or 12-hour window remained sleek and healthy, even if they cheated occasionally on weekends. What’s more, mice that were switched out of an eat-anytime schedule lost some of the weight they had gained."
From paragraph three: "The caloric intake for all the mice was the same."
So, at least in the opinion of these researchers, it is more complicated than calories in vs calories burned. I can think of at least two ways that a mammal might be a less than perfect calorie-processing machine: (1)digestion might not be 100% efficient and confounding factors could alter the how many calories are absorbed or (2)the efficiency with which calories are either burned or stored as fat could vary over time.
Alternately, different feeding patterns could lead to different levels of physical activity and alter the "calories burned" part of your equation. That would produce these results even if food was metabolized with constant efficiency.
I think that what we are finding out though, is that our perception of "calories in" is not always correct. In other words, "calories in" is more complex than the number on nutritional label.
True, and our perception of calories out is equally flawed. The average healthy adult male is supposed to burn 2500 calories a day. What if you're not average?
Maybe those people who are naturally skinny are doing 2800 a day and the fat people are 2200. 300 extra a day will add up to some serious weight gain in the long term.
Not to mention, maybe 21yr old you was at 2500cal but 35yr old you is only 2300.
So many people blindly carry on as if they're either average or young, wondering why they're still gaining weight. Then they'll start saying silly things like the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to dieting...
> Salk scientists fed groups of adult males one of four diets: high-fat, high-fructose, high-fat and high-sucrose, and regular mouse kibble. Some of the mice in each dietary group were allowed to eat whenever they wanted throughout their waking hours; others were restricted to feeding periods of nine, 12 or 15 hours. The caloric intake for all the mice was the sam
They tried different types of calories, but the number of calories was the same.
Cool. Now find a way to accurately measure energy absorbed by the human body from food (which is not necessarily calories printed on the box), and energy expended (which is not necessarily the calorie burn meter on your exercise bike) and that will be useful, actionable information.
People think they are special snowflakes whose bodies aren't bound by the laws of thermodynamics. They'd rather focus on trendy microoptimizations (like "eating vegetables before rice", and other non-sense) than diligently tracking caloric intake.
The laws of thermodynamics are not limited to the total calories consumed and calories burned during intentional exercise. Many variables matter.
We know that humans are not capable of converting 100% of food's available energy. What if your body is less capable of breaking down certain types of food right after you wake up? what if consuming a large portion of your daily diet in once overwhelms your body's ability to digest it. Science may have solved those specific questions, but pretending that the complex bag of chemical reactions in the human digestive tract is entirely governed by two simple summation variable seems naive. Please forgive any formatting errors. I'm typing this on a tiny little phone
If you assume (incorrectly, as science has proven) that the human body can metabolize 100% of the energy it consumes, your worst case scenario is your caloric intake. In practice, since you're not receiving 100% of that energy, you're actually better off. Figure out your BMR (basal metabolic rate) and add your estimated calorie expenditure and consume fewer calories than that. The fact that not all those calories are actually used by the body makes it even easier to stay below your daily energy requirements. Thanks for the reply
The study is specifically stating that of groups of mice consuming similar diets with the same caloric intake, the group that ate whenever they wanted became obese and unhealthy while the windowed eaters did not. That, I think, is scientific evidence that strict caloric regulation is not a complete solution as implied by you first commment. I think the researchers would agree that the difference between obese and healthy is not the result of a micro optimization.
The point I was making is that the equation isn't calories_in + calories_out = weight_loss/gain. It is at least x(calories_in) + y(calories_out) = weight_loss/gain where x and y are complex physical and chemical variables that we haven't completely teased out yet. One less than insignificant part of x seems to be related to the time window of consumption. A small change in x or y would result in significant improvements over the course of a life.
I'm thinking more in the context of modern "weight loss" theory. These articles are just more fuel for fat Americans, Brits, and Aussies who want a scapegoat for their weight and a shortcut to lose it. They will do anything except change their diet and (optionally) exercise. They've made that small change to x or y for years and aren't willing to revert those changes. Thanks for the reply.
And some people think that it's as simple as calories-in vs. calories-out and completely ignore the effect of hormones on our hunger and energy levels and the root cause of why we tend to be sedentary and overeat. The main culprit is insuline, we've known this for decades. If you can keep your insulin levels under control by restricting carbohydrate intake, and increasing natural dietary fat intake and eating moderate protein your body will naturally tend to suppress your appetite and you'll eat less and become leaner until you get close to your ideal weight.
Enter the portion control diet. This is the only diet that I've been successful with, and I've been doing it for just over a year now. The reason I'm able to sustain it, is because I can eat whatever I want. For example, I eat ice cream every night if I want, but only a scoop, and when I go out to eat, I split my entree and take half home. The only caveat is that I try my best not to eat processed food; if I can't make it at home with whole ingredients, then I will likely not eat it.
I can now look at a plate of food an know exactly how much will fill me up (this took a while). So, even when I don't leave the table feeling full, I know I'll feel satisfied within 15 minutes. I used to love the feeling of being overstuffed, but now I just feel sick when I overeat, and I don't enjoy it.
I've lost over 30 lbs in the past year using the portion control method. It's not a lot, but it's a healthy reduction, and one that I know I can sustain.
I know everyone is different when it comes to dieting, both mentally and physically, but I just wanted to share my experience with the most successful diet I've ever undertaken. I hope someone else can benefit from my anecdote.